Thursday, April 25, 2013

Running Up That Road, Running Up That Hill

I have been running for about eleven years now, (and boy are my legs tired—ba-dum-bum.) In that time I have found running to be a great metaphor for many things. It gives
me a way to wrap my head around the difficulties of marriage and parenting, the
process of developing a good habit, and the work and commitment required to
tackle any large undertaking. I often
find that my running life gives me a way to make sense of my non-running life.

Lately I have found that sometimes the opposite can be true,
too. Sometimes my non-running life can
give me a unique way to think about my running.
This has happened twice in the past few months here in the hills around
Ithaca.

When life gives you lemons you
are supposed to make lemonade (and maybe add a bit of ice and gin). When life gives you hills, as it does so
abundantly here in the Finger Lakes, you just need to build them right into
your runs on purpose. Make them useful. So that is what I have been doing with a
particular beast-of-a-hill called Besemer Hill Road.

After living and running in New Haven, CT for nine years,
(elevation 43 feet above sea level), Besemer Hill looks like a mountain. If I get to the end of the driveway and turn
left, then climbing Besemer will not be a part of my run. If instead I turn right, I know that 1.7
miles down the road comes The Hill. It
is a decision I make in the driveway, without the terrible image of the Hill
before me. Once I turn right, it is
already a done deal. All told, the Hill
is 1.5 miles long and gains more than 500 feet of altitude. The worst section gains more than 300 feet in
a half-mile. It is a killer.

To get myself up and over Besemer without stopping to walk I
sometimes have to play tricks on myself.
(Being human, this is very easy to do.)
And this is where I have noticed my non-running life coming in useful to
my runs. One trick I play is to remember
a scene from Barbara Kingsolver’s excellent novel Animal Dreams. One of the characters in the book is a train
engineer in the mountain West. In one
scene he describes the difficulties involved in getting a long train up and
over a big hill. Once the front of the
train crests the hill and begins its descent, the train experiences gravity
pulling it apart from the center. Both
the front cars and the rear cars are being pulled back down their respective
sides of the hill and an unskilled engineer can lose the entire train if it
uncouples.

To prevent this from happening, there are engines at the
rear of the train to provide a push up the hill, but they must be in synch with
the front engines providing pull so the cars in the middle are not
accordioned. It is a hard process to get
right and requires much skill. So when I
am trudging up Besemer Hill I sometimes take part of my brain and send it on
ahead up and over the top. I imagine it
coming down the other side of the hill and back toward the driveway. And then I trick myself into believing that
that part of me that has already made it to the top is providing some pull as my legs provide some push and, together, they get me over the top and
back home. And in that way Barbara
Kingsolver gets me over Besemer Hill.

This past weekend I listened to a Radiolab episode called Emergence while driving back from New Haven.
There was a segment explaining how ants seek, find, and collect food to
bring back to the nest. It has to do
with order emerging from chaos, and the way this happens in ants is through the
pheromone trails each individual lays as it walks. As individual ants search for and then find a
food source, they are constantly secreting chemical trails. At first these trails are random but over
time, as more ants discover the food, the trails in the vicinity have more and
more pheromone laid down on top and become stronger and easier to follow. If five ants have walked the same trail, the
scent is stronger than if just one or two have gone that way, making it more
likely that successive ants will follow that particular path and in doing so,
they will add their scent to the trail as well, making it even stronger.

I had this image in mind two days ago as I got to the end of
the driveway and had to decide—left or right?
It was a very long and snowy winter here and I had not run up Besemer
Hill since November. In ant terms, there
were no pheromone trails going off to the right and therefore nothing for me to
follow that way. But I knew that I
wanted to start building the Hill back into some of my regular runs. In the end, what helped me decide to go right
was thinking about future-me getting to the end of the driveway and sniffing
around for a direction. I wanted today’s
me to get there and be able to tell that the freshest, most recent trail goes
to the right and that I should follow that runner who took that trail on
Tuesday. And when I again choose that
trail today, I will be helping Saturday’s me make the same decision, but it
will be less of a decision and more of a built-in instinct. The trail will just get stronger and stronger
and the decision will just get easier and easier.

Sometimes I love how simultaneously stupid and complex our
minds can be. It is like we are both: the dumb individual ants out in the world basing every move and action on blind
instinct, and the larger colony benefiting from the results of all those unplanned,
unexamined actions. In the end, whatever
gets me up and over Besemer Hill can only be good.

5 comments:

I will surely be thinking of this post when I follow a whole bunch of ants in the Bear Mountain 50k next weekend. If nothing else, reflecting on your hill-climbing strategies will provide a welcome distraction. Good luck with Besemer; it sounds like a beast :)

I was just trying to use the web to find that passage from Barbara Kingsolver, about the train, and my search led me to your posting. I needed that passage for some work I'm doing this morning ... before I head out for a run, here in Tromsø. Your running thoughts are just about enough to get me through this cup of coffee, up out of my chair, and out onto my favorite hilly path here in the high north. Thanks!

Thank you for your insight. I am a beginner training for my first triathlon and running is my weakest point. I very much dislike running and I just found out last weekend the running path is very hilly. I will try to think on these things as I practice! The more I run the easier it will get.

Welcome

Thanks for coming here to check out my occasional postings. Originally, this was a place to share some of the articles I have written for the Ithaca Child parent newspaper from Tompkins County in Upstate New York. It has morphed into a catchall receptacle for my random thoughts and jottings. I used to just file them away on my computer's hard drive, but now I polish them (ever-so-slightly) and put them online. If you read one that makes you want to respond with a comment, please do so. The Internet can feel like a great big void. Comments about what I have written would let me know that the void has some inhabitants. Thanks again for coming.